Expressions of public dissent violate the smug Brussels worldview in which all EU decisions are for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. Any challenge provokes accusations of populism and xenophobia. Nothing can be more alien to the Brussels mind than the cut and thrust of referendum debates over Europe — it risks giving the people a say over matters that Europe’s managerial political caste consider theirs alone.

And these people suggest that anyone who disagrees with them simply must be right wing fascists, indeed Nazis. A familiar tactic?

The idea that voters are the bearers of a fascistic, nationalist or irrational virus that threatens to tear down civilisation, emerged again two weeks ago when Tony Blair waded into the British referendum debate. “Nationalism is a powerful sentiment. Let that genie out of the bottle and it is a Herculean task to put it back. Reason alone struggles. The referendum on Europe carries with it the same risk,” he said.

Don’t be fooled by the apocalyptic scaremongering: these people are just frightened of losing. Blair revealed as much when he warned about “the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice”. It is a grubby mindset that reveals the lack of strong proEuropean ideals among the EU’s supporters. They, our managers, people like Blair, know best. We, the voters, the irrational public, cannot be trusted to be “sensible”. The EU’s enduring hostility to referendums reveals it to be a union of rulers united in mistrust of the people. The referendum question is the acid test.

All of this reminds me of William F. Buckley Jr’s observation that he would rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

The same goes for a random sample of Eurosceptics compared to the EU bureaucracy.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Steyn again reveals the hypocrisy — or is it just naivety of the Left that I reported on here in February — over the Arab Spring, and how it takes a Jew to speak up for the millions of Christians now being persecuted.

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi inEngland, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”